IN-PERSON CLASS with Jules Nyquist Appetites: Using Food as Metaphor: Holiday edition with Jules Nyquist (includes potluck lunch) December 6, 2025 in Placitas, NM

10 am - 3 pm (includes potluck lunch and all handouts)

PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED. LIMIT 12 STUDENTS.

DWhat foods and food rituals have meaning to you this winter holiday season?

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love it it…and it is all one.”  M.F.K. Fisher

Like cooking, writing is the process of pulling together raw ingredients with inspiration to create a work of art, such as a poem. Food and the rituals associated with it may generate powerful emotions and can inspire strong writing. The holiday season may be a joyful or stressful time. We will write our way through with writing exercises and prompts about food and rituals, memories around a kitchen table, eating habits during economic or political uncertainty, travel, gathering with family, friends, or solo, childhood experiences and whatever fall and winter traditions (religious or not) you choose to acknowledge. We will read and write our own responses to food poems by Elizabeth Alexander, Lynn Emmanuel, Ray Gonzalez, Jane Hirshfield,  Galway Kinnell, Ted Kooser, Demetria Martinez, Pablo Neruda, Ed Ochester, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Randall, Ruth Stone, and more, including Jules Nyquist’s Appetites poems.